Austerlitz meeting notes...

sol·ip·sism  (slp-szm, slp-)

n. Philosophy

1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.

2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.

The discussion last night bounced back and forth and back again a bit disjointedly but nonetheless helped do what book group does best...give readers insights that can not be gained through solitary reading and reflection. Some threads of discussion:


A memoir-like novel that is a many layered text.  A work that leads readers to question reality.  Memory.  Time.  And philosophy.

Book talk began with a discussion about the author's decision to include  discarded, flea market postcards and unidentified photos.  The sponsor stated that she valued and recommended the book because of the philosophical questions it raises: What is the reality of a photo, image, or experience? Is reality whatever an   individual interprets it to be, as solipsism suggests. Is only what the self knows or believes real?

Most agreed that Sebald was able to brilliantly  develop his out of focus, disconnected, deeply depressed character, Austerlitz, using scavenged, soft- focus photos and the device of a dispassionate narrator relaying Austerlitz's painful journey.  Sebald's version of the found photos is  authentic...a reality that he created that rings true.  (The sponsor also wondered how the invention of photography and photos themselves affect the way we remember and construct our past reality.  Members briefly mused about how long photos remain recognizable...three generations?...before they are meaningless.)

 A work that tells a  truth about the Holocaust.  All done by Sebald without resorting to traditional plot lines and character exposition.

Conversation was diverted abruptly away from the philosophical towards the emotional impact of the story.  (Mea culpa...but it eventually came back to philosophy.)  One member said that this book, different from many of the novels we have read in the past, did not rely on enfolding of characters through straight-forward narrative and plot. My words follow, so I guess my reality, but it states the premise I think I heard: The Holocaust in Austerlitz is no operatic drama of death, but, instead, a slow, steady erosion of life. A quick sand that sucks you in despite or because of your struggle to free yourself. A Holocaust dependent upon things as mundane as a 1000 French movers earning their salary by clearing out 40,000 victims' apartments. A Holocaust that is so meticulous and thorough,   rosin  from violin cases is painstakingly collected and stacked in a warehouse.  A  Holocaust that masquerades a death camp as a place of culture.  And a Holocaust that mangled Austerlitz's spirit or soul at the age of 4 and a half.  (The  Kinder Transport saved Austerlitz's life, but left him unable to get close to other human beings.  And for most of his life, to face the mystery of his origin. Documentaries of Kinder Transport suggest that the feeling of abandonment never goes away.)

Sebald tells the truth about memory, the passage of time.


Austerlitz's suppressed memories  are always lurking ready to appear through faces, an object in a flea market, through a glimpse at photo, by walking in a room. Austerlitz longs to  find what he lost in the past in the corners of the world that seem never to change.  Several members mentioned their  early sensory memories of their world are their most vivid memories.  

A work with sentences that run on for pages and meander on but that contain gems of thought and create a mood that matches the content.

Paraphrased comments:  "Difficult to read.   I had to reread each time I picked up the book before I could move on."  Contrasting point of view: " I could read in snatches or long sections and still feel connected and satisfied." Members who stuck with it, were glad that they did.  

BUT...

One reader just came to find out why she should have read or should have appreciated reading the book, when she didn't.  Forgot to ask her if she found out.  G?  Care to comment?  Another member stopped reading altogether and didn't come to meeting. The foreword we read from, left her even less interested in reading.  After hearing my version of the discussion, she said she might pick the book/Kindle up again.

click comments below for another point of view and other comments

Next Book: Austerlitz April 25, 2012

In a No Man's Land of Memories and Loss

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

With W. G. Sebald's haunting new book, ''Austerlitz,'' we are transported to a memoryscape -- a twilight, fogbound world of half-remembered images and ghosts that is reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman's ''Wild Strawberries,'' Kafka's troubling fables of guilt and apprehension and, of course, Proust's ''Remembrance of Things Past.'' As in Proust's great masterwork, ordinary objects and places reverberate with memories, but in ''Austerlitz'' those memories -- triggered by a train station, say, a deserted house, an old photograph or a domed ceiling -- tend to remain fragmentary, elusive and vaguely sinister.

October 26, 2001ARTSREVIEW
From the New York Times 

Big City Book Group Link Below

New York Times Book Group

Birds Without Wings: Meeting Notes by BB

As eight of us gathered to discuss Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernieres, Lily, the hostess's fluffy white lapdog, greeted us at the door barking.  She calmed down after sniffing doggy treats in the pocket of one of our members and spent the rest of the evening begging and eating.  

De Bernieres is author also of Corelli’s Mandolin, which we read and discussed a few years ago.  In Birds, we found considerable difference between the sections on historical events and personages and those on the fictional characters in a fictional village. The former were so filled with facts we didn’t try to remember them all.  The latter were poignant and often comical.  

We decided that this is primarily an anti-war book as is borne out in the dedication:  “In the grand scheme of things, this book is necessarily dedicated to the unhappy memory of the millions of civilians on all sides during the times portrayed, who became victims of the numerous death marches, movements of refugees, campaigns of persecution and extermination, and exchanges of population.”

 Those of us sided completely with the Armenians, Greeks and Jews after our group read Snow by  Orhan Pamuk now found our sympathies extending to include Islamists and, indeed, all the many peoples in the area who were in turn victims and victimizers. 

 In its descriptions of war, this novel is as gory as anything we’ve ever read and, in its various expressions of love, as lyrically tender.  We were particularly struck by the author’s depiction of women’s feelings.

Members compared this book to Don Quixote for its wise-cracking, philosophical folly and exaggeration and to War and Peace for its juxtaposition of world affairs and domesticity.

One member wondered at how the author, an Englishman, could know so intimately the ins and outs of daily life in his mixed-ethnic fictional village.  Perhaps the answer can be discerned in the acknowledgements in the back of the hardback edition in which the author thanks both Turkish diplomats who made “a huge stack of British Foreign Office records” available to him and also acknowledges fifteen individuals from two bookstore owners to a priest to a cook to a coppersmith.

One of our members brought to our attention “Letter from Turkey: The Deep State” in the March 12 issue of The New Yorker.   

Two of our members have visited Istanbul and were struck by the many layers of history all in one place and by the clash of East and West--women wearing bright, tight jeans and high heels, for instance, along with decorative head coverings.  We talked about the displacement of American Indians and about official narratives persuading us to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Amidst a rich, wide-ranging conversation, only Lily kept her focus on one thing and one thing only.